32.Back formation. Characteristic features of back formation.

Back-Formation (Reversion). The earliest examples of this type of word-building are the verb to “beg” that was made from the French borrowing “beggar”. In this case the verb was made from the noun by subtracting what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix -er.

This type of word-building received the name of back-formation or reversion because it was always taken for granted that any noun denoting profession or occupation is certain to have a corresponding verb of the same root but in this case the verb was produced from a noun by subtraction.

Later examples of back-formation are (to butle from butler, to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to force-land from forced landing).

33. Secondary ways of word formation.

There are also secondary ways of word-building: sound- interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation (disaffixation). Sound-interchange is the way of word-building when some sounds are changed to form a new word, e.g. to strike – stroke, to sing – song. Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. accent – to accent. Sound imitation is the way of word-building when a word is built by imitating different sounds: a) sounds produced by human beings: to whisper, to mumble; b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects: to moo, to hiss, to buzz; c) sounds produced by nature and objects: to splash, to bubble, to clatter. Blends are words formed from a word-group or two synonyms, e.g. hustle (hurry and bustle), cinemaddict (cinema addict). Backformation (disaffixation) is the way of word-building when a word is formed by dropping the final morpheme to form a new word, e.g. to bach (from bachelor), to televise (from television). The part-of-speech meaning of the primary word is changed, verbs are formed from nouns.

34. Morphemes: bound and free morphemes.

By the degree of their independence morphemes are classified into free and bound. Free morphemes may occur alone and coincide with word-forms or immutable words: at, by, water- (water, watery). Bound morphemes occur only in combination with other morphemes: dis- (dislike), -y (watery). Most roots are free but some are bound: cran- (cranberry). Affixes are always bound. Some morphemes occupy an intermediate position between free and bound: 1. semi-affixes: -man (postman), half- (half-eaten); 2. combining forms: tele- (television), graph (autograph); By their frequency morphemes are classified into recurrent and unique. Recurrent morphemes are found in a number of words: sing-ing = sing- (singer, sing-song) + -ing (walking, drawing). Unique morphemes are found only in a given word: pock (pocket). By their activity in the language affixes are subduvided into productive and non-productive. Productive affixes are used to build new words: -ism (escapism), - ize (nationalize). Non-productive affixes do not build new words: -th (growth), - ous (monotonous). By their position in the word affixes are subdivided into prefixes and suffixes. A prefix stands before the root and modifies its lexical meaning: kind – unkind. In some cases it changes the word‘s grammatical or lexico-grammatical meaning: sleep (noun) – asleep (stative). A suffix follows the root, modifying its lexical meaning and changing the word‘s grammatical or lexico-grammatical meaning: appear (verb) – appearance (noun). The suffix renders a very general meaning and is often fused with the root semantically.